Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to DevelopYour Business Online

Chapter 38. Social Networks Are Your Local Pubs

Walking out the door the other night to watch the Super Bowl last year was interesting. I walked past the Barking Dog (a local bar), past the Ale House (another bar), past the Carriage Wheel, and then into the Stage 2 Cinema Pub, which is normally a movie theater, but when there's a big sports event, it transforms into a great place to watch a game. I realized that any one of those places I walked past had people watching the game. I knew that each one of those places had "regulars" and "visitors" and a sense of what's okay and what draws disapproving stares. Sounds a bit like social networks, if you squint.

WHAT HAPPENS AT PUBS

Laura "Pistachio" Fitton called Twitter a village.^[169] That's one way to look at it, as lots of different things happen there, and her analogy works out well. I'm going to go another way. I'm going to compare Twitter to what happens at a pub. And I'm going to compare Utterli and Facebook and Seesmic and Yahoo! Groups and Digg to all kinds of other pubs. Jonathan Schwartz blogged recently^[170] about Sun's intent to reinvigorate its software communities. Another pub.

Pubs are where people talk. There's news. There's gossip. There are deals and selling. There are pronouncements. There are silly moments. There are conversations and chance, random happenings. The thing is, pubs aren't places where you do things. They are places where you talk about things. Right? They might be where the seeds of ideas come from (lots ...